Sealing materials are used to seal a volume vis-à-vis another volume. Here, the seals can serve, for example, to keep out noxious gases or else as a vacuum seal in order to create or maintain a vacuum. Depending on the application, very different and, at times, high demands are made of such sealing materials, for example, when it comes to achieving good resistance to aggressive gases or a low permeation rate, for instance, for water, helium, nitrogen or oxygen (e.g. electric switching elements). Other important properties of seals are their resistance to the operating temperatures, resistance to oils, ultimate tensile strength, rupture strength, compression set resistance, outgassing behavior in a vacuum or their vacuum leakage rate.
Nowadays, no inexpensive sealing material is available that can satisfy all of the above-mentioned applications equally well. Different seals made of different sealing materials are used for the individual applications, depending on the requirements in question. Sometimes, metal seals in the form of disposable seals have to be used for this purpose. Consequently, different seals have to be kept on hand for various technical systems. It would be desirable if one single sealing material were available with which seals could be made that would meet a wide array of different requirements equally well. It would also be desirable if seals made of this sealing material were reusable in order to reduce material consumption.